Titleholder system

The titleholder system is the most common type of structure used in professional tournaments in the game of go. In practice these events almost always are based in East Asian countries with a professional system: China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. The system originated from competitions sponsored by Japanese newspapers, and has the effect that major go events are spread out over a whole year of preliminaries, with a matchplay final that takes place over a month or two. While this makes tournaments slow-moving and diffuse by the standards of some other mind sports, rather than happening in a single place over a short time span, the system is well entrenched. The sponsoring newspapers can fill a daily column easily throughout the year, while the players can juggle commitments to a number of tournaments and outside interests by asking for scheduling that fits in everything.

Each of the major events, for example the Kisei tournament in Japan, has a complicated set of qualifying rounds to select a challenger. The qualifying system is a long series of single elimination tournaments feeding into two separate round-robin (league) systems. The single elimination tournaments involve lower-ranked pros, who are met with higher-ranked pros in later stages. The winners of the two round-robins play off to produce a single challenger, who then goes on to play the titleholder. For example for the Kisei, this is the previous year's Kisei winner, who will not have participated in the event up to this point. The Kisei match is a best-of-seven. Each game is scheduled in a different city; the Kisei first game is often played outside Japan, for example in Europe or North America, to attract attention. The match then settles into a schedule of a game every two weeks or one week (in the case of the Kisei the games take two days to finish, and the players need time to recuperate properly).

The winner of the title match then enters the record books, and returns to defend the title the following year (cases where the title is for some reason not defended have been very rare). The most common measure of a top player's success, in Japan at least, is the total number of titles accumulated, with a handful of players winning more than 60.

"Shogi"

The same type of system is used in Japan for "shogi".

Other systems

The first titleholder system of the modern pattern was the Honinbo tournament. Before that was introduced in the early 1940s, other systems used were the win-and-continue system, which has the advantage of low organisational overheads, and high-profile "jubango". There has been no "jubango" since 1960, but win-and-continue systems are used in South Korea. Teams matches were also popular in the 1920s.

The introduction of international go events led to the adoption of new systems for those, mostly based on knockout rounds, and international titles are typically not awarded under the titleholder system. That is, the holder has to compete in the event's earlier stages, a system akin to the way tennis tournaments do it, with the champion perhaps avoiding preliminaries and being seeded into the final stages.